This invention relates to ink jet printheads and more particularly to nozzle plates for ink jet printheads and method of fabrication thereof.
As the ink jet industry moves to ink jet printheads having higher printing resolution, such as 600 dots per inch or more, a primary limit on image quality will come from errors in the direction that the droplets take when they leave the printhead nozzles. The droplet direction and error therein is referred to as directionality. Directionality problems may be incurred from several sources, such as the nozzle shapes, surface energy of the nozzle face, and ink that collects on a nozzle face near a nozzle to name a few examples. One solution to this problem is to use a nozzle plate. Other advantages of nozzle plates are that the maintenance station has a uniform surface to seal against and to clean.
Because of the small area of a printhead nozzle, especially for high resolution printheads where the sizes are in the range of 0.0332 cm.sup.2 per nozzle, nozzle openings in a typical polymeric nozzle plate are so small that they are generally produced by laser ablation. Such laser ablation processes can not only be time consuming and expensive, but also produce debris or artifacts which must be collected and/or controlled to prevent entry into the printhead, for example.